UConn Basketball

The NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee announced Wednesday that it denied an appeal by former UConn men's basketball coach Kevin Ollie that sought to end his show-cause restriction. 

"The NCAA Division I Infractions Appeals Committee upheld findings that a former head UConn men's basketball coach violated head coach responsibility and ethical conduct rules," the NCAA said in a press release. "The committee also upheld a penalty that requires the former head coach to serve a three-year show-cause order, according to the decision."

Ollie was given a three-year show-cause order in July for several violations of NCAA rules and lying to investigators. The investigation found Ollie failed to monitor his staff, held preseason pickup games that violated NCAA restrictions and hired staff that exceeded the number allowed by rule.

A show-cause order ensures that violations given to coaches follow them to their next jobs, which often limits their number of opportunities. If a school wants to hire Ollie in the next three years, they'll have to agree to abide by any sanctions imposed by the NCAA or appear in front of the Committee on Infractions and show why it should not be penalized for hiring him.

Ollie's attorney, Jacques Parenteau, issued a statement to ESPN calling the decision "disgraceful": 

"While we are not surprised that the NCCA Infractions Appeals Committee would simply rubber stamp the original, biased decision, it is disgraceful this committee refused to consider the ample evidence produced by counsel for Kevin Ollie showing that witnesses had lied.

"Throughout this process the NCAA has repeatedly demonstrated that its number one priority is to protect UConn, its member, and will eagerly do so at the expense of Kevin Ollie's rights. What is most shameful is the NCAA pretends that its decisions are based upon a fair adjudicative process when clearly that is not the case. Nevertheless, we will continue to fight for Kevin Ollie in the ongoing arbitration and are confident that his rights will ultimately be vindicated."

Ollie served as UConn's head coach from 2012-2018, winning the 2014 NCAA tournament before presiding over a program that fell into mediocrity over the final years of his tenure. The NCAA vacated all of UConn's wins from the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons, and Ollie has not worked in college basketball since he was fired by his alma mater.

Ollie filed a grievance against UConn to obtain $10 million in back pay after the school fired him with cause. 

Paige Bueckers twirls a pencil in her hand and stares at the blank form. It's a Thursday night in February, and she's sitting with teammates at a post-practice pizza-and-pasta party in the Hopkins (Minn.) High School cafeteria. The form is for the team's forthcoming end-of-year banquet, and the questions are layups. Her nickname? P. Diddy. Her childhood dream job? FBI agent. Where she wants to be in 10 years? The WNBA.

Still, she hesitates over each answer. Turning in this form means facing the end. Right now, she's the consensus No. 1 player in the 2020 girls recruiting class. There's a good argument that she's the best player in high school basketball, regardless of gender. She's put four gold medals around her neck and a state championship ring on her finger. Before games, she and her teammates go to the mall and gorge on Chick-fil-A sandwiches, and then they beat their opponents by an average of 34.9 points. Her Royals haven't lost in two years. Her father, Bob, and her seven-year-old brother, Drew, are in the bleachers every night.

Unlike the best boys' basketball players, who experience the business side of the game as high school freshmen, Bueckers has been able to enjoy a relatively normal teenage life until this season. She's never transferred high schools, and she still doesn't have to worry too much about the ulterior motives of teammates or friends. She's savoring that sweet spot of life, the spring of a senior year, that adults daydream about when they're pretending to answer emails at work.

But after she turns the form in, everything will be a blur. She'll be honored at the banquet. She'll play her last game at Hopkins. She'll walk across the stage to receive her diploma. She'll drive across the country to enroll at UConn. She'll put on her Huskies uniform for her first game. She'll become the most scrutinized freshman in the country. Basketball will still be a joy, but it will no longer be just that. It will also be a job.

She looks down at the next question: "What's the best advice you've ever received?" She looks up at her teammates, who are loudly debating their favorite Netflix shows and recording TikTok dance videos. She puts her pencil to the paper: "Never forget to have fun."

"If I sent a message to myself in the future," she'll say later, "it would definitely just be to stay true to myself, to always be the same Paige Bueckers I was when I was 18 years old."

So who is that self? As she scribbles answers to the final questions, a freshman named Taylor Woodson tries to take advantage of her distraction. Bueckers has two frosted cookies on her plate, and Woodson asks for one. Bueckers asks if Woodson already ate one, and she says no. Bueckers stands up to pass her the treat when her teammates' giggles stop her short. Woodson has one of the very same cookies on her plate. Bueckers rolls her eyes. But Woodson, emboldened, still asks Bueckers to split it with her. Bueckers pauses.

"You remember that three-on-one in our last game," she asks, "when you pulled up instead of passing?" 

"Yeah…" Woodson replies.

"If we get a fast break tomorrow," Bueckers asks, "what are you going to do?"

"Pass it to you," Woodson says.

The entire team laughs. They know by now that if you're running a fast break with Bueckers, she's going to let you have the bucket. She has no problem scoring her own points, so she tends to give the easy ones away. And she gives the cookie away, too.

"I'm letting you have my favorite cookie," she says, "just so you know that I love you."

Then she puts her backpack on and walks out of the cafeteria, leaving the form on the table unfinished.

---

The next night, Bueckers (pronounced "Beckers") boards a bus to Buffalo High School for a game. She falls asleep as her suburban city gives way to small towns and frozen cornfields during the 45-minute drive. She yawns as she enters the school's gym, and hugs a girl on JV as she sits on the bench during the opening game, which Hopkins wins handily. The Buffalo varsity team is 6-14 on the season, and everyone expects the main show to be a blowout. But that doesn't seem to affect the turnout.

Along the baseline, seven photographers and videographers have assembled in hopes of capturing Bueckers' next viral highlight. And in the stands, Buffalo's student section, "The Herd," has gathered for the first time during the girls' basketball season. More than 50 students are on their feet in the bleachers before the game tips off, hoping for a long-shot upset. Bueckers puts them back on their butts within minutes.

Five seconds into the game, the 5'11" guard scores on a mid-range pull-up. On the ensuing Buffalo possession, she intercepts a pass at midcourt and jogs in for a layup. On defense, the Royals are pressing, and Bueckers is everywhere. One minute, she's setting a trap in the corner and forcing a timeout. The next she's baiting another bad pass and blowing by defenders for another bunny. On offense, she threads double-teams like she's strolling the through the cafeteria at lunch. Her passes are so stealthy they sometimes land with a thud on her own teammates' chests. More often, though, they land in the hoop after a wide-open look.

This season, she's averaging "only" 21.4 points per game—a four-year low—in part because she rarely has to score in the second half, and in part because she's nearly doubled her number of assists (9.2 per game) from a season ago (5.4). "I think what's special about Paige is her passing,"  Hopkins coach Brian Cosgriff says. "I haven't seen too many females pass like Paige. Plus, she can shoot the basketball, and she's faster than you think, and she jumps higher than you think. And she's just got that—she's just got it. And you don't know where she got it because Mom and Dad are not very big, and they weren't great athletes or anything like that. She's just been blessed."

Her dad played point guard in high school and coached Paige until she was in elementary school. He and Paige's mom, Amy, divorced when their daughter was three. Paige stayed in Minnesota with her dad while her mom remarried and moved to Billings, Montana. Bob tried to put Paige in plenty of other sports as a kid, but it was clear by first grade that she was going basketball or bust. Not even the track coach's promise to buy her ice cream after meets could convince Paige to leave the hardwood for a full day. By fourth grade, people were talking about the possibility of her playing for UConn. By seventh grade, she was playing with high schoolers. By eighth grade, she was on varsity.

At this point in her career, her trophy case would be the envy of some small high schools. She's won four gold medals and three international tournament titles with USA Basketball. She's a two-time Gatorade State Player of the Year, and she's appeared on every All-America list imagined. And she still has another season's worth of accolades to earn this spring. The only things she's collected more regularly than these honors are her opponents' ankles and egos.

Last spring, she won her first state championship despite having spent the entire day leading up to the game vomiting. That's right, she's already had her own flu game. All of it amounts to a resume that, at 18, has her thinking not just about becoming the best player in the WNBA but also about what it will take to maintain that title for years. "There's always going to be somebody chasing me, or there's always going to be somebody better than me," she says. "I'll never be able to reach perfection, so I can always strive to be perfect. I'm not at my full potential yet, and I'm just in high school, and I want to keep going—in college and the pros. I want to just keep playing basketball and keep getting better and never get complacent with where I'm at right now."

Right now, she and the Royals are heading to the locker room with a 47-15 lead at the half. The only drama in the second half comes when an opposing player actually crosses up Bueckers and puts her on the floor. The long-dormant student section rises like a wave and cheers like the home team has tied the score.

In previous seasons, she might have responded with a reckless drive and some spirited trash talk. Last year, she got so fired up at a perceived slight from an opponent that she described the Royals' next play to her in detail. "There's gonna be a screen on your left," Bueckers told her, "but I'm gonna let you come off it clean. And then I'm gonna hit a three in your face." And she did just that. But now she saves her trash talk for teasing her teammates in practice and for demoralizing opponents who dare try to get under her skin. "If someone talks trash to me," she says, "I'm going to get hyped. And they're going to get it back much worse than they gave it."

But on this night, there's no boasting, so Bueckers takes it easy on Buffalo, rifling a no-look pass on the next possession that only seemed possible with X-ray vision. "She could score on every possession if she wanted to," says sophomore Maya Nnaji, herself a coveted recruit. "She's the best scorer in the nation. But she chooses to be unselfish so that the rest of us can get better and we can win more games."

A few minutes later, the Royals finish off a 69-34 win. It's the fifth time this season they've more than doubled their challenger's final tally. (Only two teams have come within 10 points at the final buzzer.) It's the kind of performance that will result in a half-dozen more clips in her many mixtapes and countless text messages from friends and fellow players. "They're always saying, 'Oh, man, UConn needs you right now!'" she says, "but I know it won't be like that next year. All the players have told me, 'Your freshman season is going to suck.'"

Indeed, Huskies coach Geno Auriemma is notoriously tough on freshmen, and particularly on his top recruits. And with the program in the kind of mini-slump that only dynastic teams like the New England Patriots can appreciate, the pressure on Bueckers will be enormous. "That's why I'm just trying to enjoy everything that's happening now," she says. "There's so much left to do before I go."

---

Despite the drubbing, a couple dozen Buffalo fans wait for Bueckers after the game. For 18 minutes, she signs every shirt and poster and poses for every picture and selfie. One girl, 13-year-old Allie Leithner, had put the game on her calendar months ago and had reminded her parents to bring her every week since then. After meeting Paige, she started crying. She was so moved that she wasn't even planning on sharing the image on social media. "I'm going to put it on the poster board in my room," she says. "That's where I keep the pictures of all my best friends."

Already, Bueckers knows she's an icon for young women. And not just young either: As the line dwindles, two mothers wonder aloud whether it would be weird if they asked Bueckers for a photo. At the end of the impromptu autograph session, Buffalo coach Grant Stewart thanks Bueckers for staying in his school after she just walloped his team. "I've never seen something like that at a girls' high school basketball game," he says. "But I've never seen a player like Paige."

The next morning, Bueckers and her teammates are back at Hopkins to review film from the game. An assistant coach brings doughnuts as a reward for the team's defensive performance. Bueckers waits for her teammates to make their selections and then plays eenie, meenie, miney, moe to choose her cream-filled, chocolate-frosted and sprinkled breakfast. As the players eat, Cosgriff picks over any small error he can find. But mostly he implores his other players to be more like Bueckers. "Look at Paige run!" he tells the team while watching a loose-ball battle. "Look at her going to get it! What is she doing that the rest of you can't do? Nothing! It's just effort!"

His only question for her comes from a moment late in the game, when she appears to say something on the free-throw line. Was she talking trash late in a blowout win? "I was just telling Nnaji that I love her," she says. The team laughs together.

After film, Bueckers stays behind as Cosgriff checks in on emails between school administrators and organizers of the Geico High School Nationals. State rules forbid teams from participating in tournaments after the conclusion of their season, and it doesn't seem like the administrators are willing to make an exception. Cosgriff promises Bueckers that he'll keep pushing for the team to make the trip.

"I hope they let us go," Bueckers says, "because I'd love to play a little while longer."

The hits keep on coming for the Connecticut Huskies amid a disappointing season by their absurdly high standards.

Though they rebounded with a victory over South Florida on Sunday, the Huskies lost 70-52 to No. 1 South Carolina last Monday. As a result, they slipped to sixth in the Associated Press' Top 25 poll.

Connecticut hadn't fallen out of the AP's top five since February 2007, a stretch of 253 consecutive weeks.

UConn falls to No. 6 in the AP Poll, ending a streak of 253 consecutive weeks in the top 5.

The last time UConn was not in the top 5 was February 5, 2007.

The longest current streak is now held by (1)South Carolina at 11 weeks. pic.twitter.com/cu4j9tvktG

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) February 17, 2020

The Huskies have become victims of their own success. Between 2008-16, they won six national titles and had four unbeaten seasons. Fans became accustomed to seeing UConn roll through the opposition in the regular season en route to the Final Four.

Geno Auriemma: "We're allowed to lose a god damned game once in a while where the other team plays better than us... So why don't you write that?"

— Mitchell Northam (@primetimeMitch) February 11, 2020

The team's struggles—if they can be labeled as such—this season were entirely predictable, though.

Kia Nurse, Azura Stevens and Gabby Williams moved on to the WNBA in 2018, and Katie Lou Samuelson and Napheesa Collier followed them to the pro ranks in 2019. That's a lot of elite talent to replace, and the Huskies are no longer the force on the recruiting trail they once were.

To make up for playing in a weaker conference, Connecticut also scheduled a number of prominent opponents to bolster its resume for NCAA tournament seeding. Running the table with South Carolina, Oregon, DePaul, Notre Dame and Baylor on the regular-season slate was going to be almost impossible.

Weep not for the Huskies, though. They're still on pace to be a No. 2 seed in the Big Dance, and they're welcoming the No. 1 player in the country, Paige Bueckers, in their 2020 recruiting class.

What constitutes as a down year for Connecticut would be considered a rousing success for almost any other program in women's basketball.

The UConn Huskies women's basketball team honored Gianna Bryant on Monday evening by putting out a jersey for her ahead of their exhibition game vs. Team USA: 

Mambacita is forever a Husky 💙 pic.twitter.com/3wdAbdK0Ye

— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) January 27, 2020

Kobe and Gianna meant a lot to our program. Our thoughts are with the Bryant family.

Mamba Mentality will live on forever, but they are deeply missed. 💙 pic.twitter.com/4Ib96yFxgg

— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) January 26, 2020

Gianna Bryant was one of nine people to die in Sunday's helicopter crash which also killed her father and NBA legend Kobe Bryant, Sarah and Payton Chester, John, Keri and Alyssa Altobelli, Christina Mauser and Ara Zobayan.

https://twitter.com/charlottecrrll/status/1221933497675370496

Kobe and Gianna Bryant attended several UConn games together, with Mike Anthony of the Hartford Courant writing that "Gianna loved Gabby Williams and dreamed of playing for Auriemma and the Huskies—so much so that Bryant once famously declared that his daughter was 'hellbent' on attending UConn."

"My daughter loves Gabby Williams, absolutely loves Gabby, loves [all of them]," Bryant told Anthony in 2018. "She watches their interviews, watches how they play and learns—not just in wins, but in tough losses, how they conduct themselves. It's great, as a parent, to be able to see my daughter pull inspiration from them."

Just remembered, last year when Kobe came to see the LeBron Lakers for the first time. If I recall correctly, in the loading dock at Staples @ReggieMillerTNT was trying to convince Kobe that Gigi should go to UCLA eventually. Kobe smiled and said she had her heart set on UConn.

— Tania Ganguli (@taniaganguli) January 27, 2020

Bryant was also a vocal supporter of women's basketball, and last week said he believed several WNBA players could play in the NBA. 

No @NBA player supported the @WNBA or women’s college basketball more than Kobe. He attended games, watched on tv, coached the next generation. We pray for his family. https://t.co/ZhTCxD3sRg

— Rebecca Lobo (@RebeccaLobo) January 26, 2020

Someone once asked if @kobebryant if he hoped to have a son to carry on his hoops legacy....
He laughed - proud of his budding basketball star daughter & said “Gigi’s got this!”
Kobe was a vocal & visible champion of the @WNBA & women’s college basketball https://t.co/AtAJLmZYZQ

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) January 27, 2020

Very heavy heart on loss of Kobe and his daughter and the others in the tragic crash today. Admired his Mamba mentality, and so grateful for Kobe’s support of the WNBA and girls basketball. Thoughts and prayers are with the Bryant family and other families impacted. #8 #24 pic.twitter.com/iXkDHUNT0P

— Cathy Engelbert (@CathyEngelbert) January 26, 2020

"I think there are a couple of players who could play in the NBA right now honestly," he said, per Calum Trenaman of CNN. "There's a lot of players with a lot of skill that could do it."

He named three in particular: "Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, Elena Delle Donne. There's a lot of great players out there so they could certainly keep up with them."

The NCAA has handed down sanctions against the Connecticut's men's basketball program for violating responsibility rules. 

Per Stacey Osburn of NCAA.com, former head basketball coach Kevin Ollie received a three-year show-cause order that will "restrict him from any athletically related duties" if he is hired by a new school "unless it shows cause why the restrictions should not apply."

Additional penalties for the basketball team include two years of probation, the vacating of records from the period in which ineligible student-athletes played in games and a reduction in scholarships from 13 to 12 for the 2019-20 academic year. 

Connecticut fired Ollie in March 2018 after investigations by the school and NCAA found him in violation of multiple rules, including working with an outside trainer in Atlanta and on campus, an impermissible phone call between a recruit and Ray Allen, and an Ollie shootaround with a recruit on an official visit. 

In February, a federal judge dismissed Ollie's lawsuit against the university in which he alleged his firing was the result of racial discrimination. Both parties are also engaged in a salary-arbitration dispute over the $10 million remaining on Ollie's deal at the time he was fired. 

Ollie was hired as UConn's basketball coach in September 2012 after Jim Calhoun retired. The 46-year-old went 127-79 in six seasons with the Huskies and won a national title in 2013-14. 

The Big East Conference announced Thursday the University of Connecticut will return as the conference's 11th member after leaving for the American Athletic Conference in 2013.

UConn's official date of reentry wasn't immediately confirmed.

Big East commissioner Val Ackerman released a statement about the return of the Huskies:

"On the 40th anniversary of our founding in 1979, we're very excited to welcome back the University of Connecticut, a Big East charter member. As a group of schools rooted in basketball pre-eminence, we can think of no better partner than UConn to join us in perpetuating the rivalries, traditions and successes that have made the Big East unlike any other conference in college basketball. We know that our competitions and the experiences of our student-athletes, coaches and supporters across all of our sports will be greatly enriched by UConn's return."

Connecticut will compete in 20 of the conference's 22 sports, but it's unclear where the school's football program is going to land after competing in the AAC for 2019.

Jeff Borzello of ESPN.com reported it's "unlikely" the Huskies would remain in the AAC for just football, making it possible they go independent if another conference isn't found.

The Big East currently doesn't feature FBS football.

UConn president Susan Herbst also provided a statement in the official announcement, which came after a week of speculation about the expected move:

"The Big East is an incredibly special and enduring part of our heritage. We were a founding member 40 years ago. Our programs grew and thrived in this conference over decades. The intensity of the competition, the passion of our rivalries, and all of our most triumphant wins and toughest losses helped to make us who we are. Coming back here means UConn is coming home. We are excited about the future."

Men's and women's basketball in the Big East figure to see the biggest boost courtesy of UConn's return.

The Big East has officially extended an invitation for UConn to rejoin the conference after presidents from each of the league's schools voted in favor of the move Monday, according to Jeff Borzello of ESPN. 

Connecticut is expected to accept the offer at a Board of Trustees meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

The school could then announce the move, which would affect every sport but football, on Thursday.

Mike Anthony and Dan Brechlin of the Hartford Courant first reported the likely move, noting the athletic department suffered a $41 million loss across all sports in 2018.

UConn was a founding member of the Big East conference in 1979 but joined the American Athletic Conference during its creation in 2013. However, the move back could lead to an ugly divorce that includes a $10 million exit fee.

"I'd be surprised if this ends pretty," a source told Matt Norlander of CBS Sports. "... [The Huskies] never fully embraced the American."

The league's bylaws require 27 months notice before leaving, but the school is expected to be a full part of the Big East by 2020-21.

The men's basketball team will be the 11th member of the conference, reuniting with rivals such as Georgetown, Villanova and St. John's. The women's basketball team will also benefit from the change, and head coach Geno Auriemma reportedly pushed for the move.

On the other hand, there is a significant question mark about the football team going forward. The Big East doesn't carry the sport, and the AAC likely won't allow the team to remain in the conference.

The Connecticut Huskies could return to the Big East in 2020 and leave the American Athletic Conference.

According to Stadium's Brett McMurphy, the fate of Connecticut's football team is unclear since the Big East doesn't extend to the sport.

As Yahoo Sports' Pete Thamel wrote, aligning with the Big East makes sense for UConn from a basketball perspective:

"The Huskies lost their geographic relevance in basketball by leaving the Big East, as organic rivals like Providence, St. John’s and Syracuse were replaced by strangers like Tulane, East Carolina and Memphis. Passion has been replaced by apathy, as once-teeming arenas became filled with empty seats and a once-rabid fan base has turned ambivalent."

The Huskies' men's team was the national champion in 2014, its first year in the AAC. Since then, UConn has one NCAA tournament appearance. Fans were voting with their feet as the basketball team saw a drop in attendance toward the end of the Kevin Ollie era, which ended in 2018 after six seasons.

The impact is evident for the women's team as well. Despite a 31-2 regular season, the Huskies were a No. 2 seed in the 2019 tournament in large part because they faced so little competition in the AAC.

Some also noted how the AAC's new television deal with ESPN left UConn as a clear loser as it made Huskies games harder to watch for fans, which limits the exposure to potential recruits as well.

Of course, the Huskies football team remains a big question mark. McMurphy reported they could move into another conference or become independent. Thamel added going the independent route "would likely end up as UConn's best option."

According to the Hartford Courant's Mike Anthony, scrapping football altogether is a nonstarter at the moment.

However, this could increase calls for Connecticut to seriously consider the future of its football team, or at the very least ponder a drop down to the FCS level. The athletic department had a roughly $40.5 million deficit in 2018, with football losing $8.7 million.

University president Thomas Katsouleas told reporters in February that he is in favor of keeping football around.

"Yes, I'm committed to football," he said. "I think it's part of the identity of who we are as a major, broad-context university and I don't think the savings from cutting it are as great as people think. In fact, it has ancillary value for the other sports and for fundraising overall."

Shifting to the Big East, however, would signal Connecticut is prioritizing success on the hardwood over growth on the gridiron.

CHICAGO — Katie Lou Samuelson knew what kind of question was coming before it was asked. The four young men approached her after watching her workout on a court near her family's home in Orange County, California. If they knew her name, they didn't say it. Instead, one shouted, "Yo!" as they walked over. And then he asked: "Would you play my friend for $100? We have a bet to see if you could beat him."

Samuelson sighed. The truth was that part of her did want to say yes. She'd been the No. 1 recruit in her high school class. She'd been a four-year starter at UConn, the most successful college sports program this century. And just the week before, she'd been selected fourth overall in the WNBA draft. She believed she'd beat any of them easily. But she knew that the small satisfaction—a hundred bucks and bragging rights—wasn't worth the big risk.

Samuelson had left Storrs, Connecticut, with scars. She had broken her foot as a freshman, sprained her ankle so severely it required offseason surgery as a junior and injured her back a few weeks before the NCAA tournament as a senior. And she had also left Storrs without something she wanted desperately: a ring from a championship game she played in. So when the men pressed her for an explanation as to why she wouldn't play, she clapped back.

"I'm sure they assumed that I walked away because I thought I would have lost," she says now. "But I told them it would be a waste of my time. I have professional basketball to play."

---

Katie Lou Samuelson's first basketball objective was basic: She wanted to be better than her sisters. Their father, Jon, had played college basketball at Cal State Fullerton and professional basketball for a brief stint in Europe. Their mother, Karen, had made the All-England netball team. (Netball is based on basketball in its original form and played without a backboard.) They wanted their daughters to try other sports, but they soon discovered that only basketball would stick. So when Katie—the youngest—came along, she got to skip soccer and swimming and head straight for the hardwood.

Jon drove the girls to courts across the county at all hours of the day. They dribbled and defended and shot at churches and rec centers and colleges. Some days, they'd each put up a couple hundred shots in the predawn light before school. Some days, they'd do conditioning drills in the evenings after their teams' practices had ended. When they played two-on-two, it'd be Katie Lou and Jon against Bonnie and Karlie. And for a while, Katie Lou figured that was because her older sisters were that much better than her.

Then, when she was in middle school and playing for a club team composed of high school upperclassmen, her coach, Russ Davis, pulled her aside after a practice. Davis told her she could be better than Bonnie and Karlie. "Once I heard that, it was go time," she says. "Until that moment, I never thought about being better than them. But as soon as I heard that I could be better than them, I knew I had to be. I had to be the best."

Being the best in this family was no easy task. Bonnie left Stanford in 2015 with the third-most three-pointers made (237) in school history. Karlie eventually passed Bonnie with 249 career threes at the same school and joined the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks. But Katie Lou separated herself starting in high school, leading Mater Dei to three straight Trinity League championships. At 6'3" and with a killer three-point shot, she was a positionless problem for any opposing defense. As a senior, she won the Naismith Trophy and was named National Player of the Year by Gatorade, McDonald's, USA Today and the Women's Basketball Coaches Association. And she surprised the recruiting world when she passed on the chance to play with Karlie at Stanford and committed to UConn.

"I hated that people assumed I was going there," she says. "When people talked to me, they would say, 'Oh, you're just going to Stanford, right?' And I would be like, 'No, I'm not just going to go to Stanford.'"

She skipped her high school graduation to start summer practices in Storrs. And she soon learned what all Geno Auriemma's freshmen find out—that being the best in high school doesn't mean much at UConn. In practices, she battled with Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck, who were selected first, second and third, respectively, in the 2016 WNBA draft. And Auriemma learned that the best way to push her was by pissing her off. If she missed a shot, he announced she was done for the day. When she struggled, he wondered aloud if he'd recruited the wrong Samuelson sister.

"I have to admit it worked," Samuelson says. "After Coach would say something, I'd go through the next drill and hit every single shot. No matter what you do, he always won. If you did well, he won. If you did bad, he won. It was the worst."

To make it through that long fall, Samuelson and her roommate, Napheesa Collier (a forward with the Huskies at the time), made a rule never to talk about basketball outside of practices and games. Instead, they spent hours studying YouTube dance routines, like "Bet You Can't Do It Like Me." "I started playing better," Samuelson says, "when I started dancing."

Unfortunately for her, the music stopped in the Final Four.

---

When she felt the pop, Samuelson was relieved. She thought she'd cracked a knuckle. For a few weeks in the spring of 2016, as UConn was making a push toward its fourth straight national championship, Samuelson had been slowed by pain in her left foot. On the first play of her first Final Four game, against Oregon State, she felt that pop and then felt like she had a rock in her shoe. At halftime, she told teammate Gabby Williams that she'd either had the best knuckle pop of her life or she'd just broken her foot.

When the trainer put her MRI scan against the light, Katie Lou could see the crack right away. She hoped no one else would. When they did, she asked if she could play anyway. They told her she couldn't. But she didn't worry because even though she had become a starter and a critical component of the team, she was confident UConn would win the national championship without her. And when she climbed the ladder in her boot two days later, she was proud to have been proved right. "It wasn't crazy devastating," she says. "I assumed we would get back to another championship game."

The Final Four exit in her sophomore year hurt the most. The storyline all week in Dallas was a potential matchup between Katie Lou's Huskies and Karlie's Stanford Cardinal in the national championship game. Instead, Katie Lou watched from the stands as Karlie got hurt in Stanford's loss in the first semifinal to South Carolina; and then her UConn team suffered a painful overtime defeat at the hands of Mississippi State. The next day, her family was exploring the infamous grassy knoll when a UConn fan bus spotted Katie Lou and asked her to come on board and say hello. She got through "thank you" before bursting into tears.

In January of her junior year, she sprained her left ankle so severely that she eventually needed four screws in an offseason surgery. In March of her senior year, she collided with a Houston defender, causing her to miss the AAC tournament. In both seasons, the Huskies were again eliminated a game short of the national championship. She left UConn as a top-10 player in career points, scoring average, field goals made, three-pointers made and three-point percentage.

She also left UConn in a hurry: The WNBA draft took place five days after the Huskies' elimination. (At the event, she even got a shoutout from Larry Bird, her favorite player, and the reason why she wears No. 33.) Selected fourth overall by the Chicago Sky, she had to miss her UConn graduation to attend training camp in Chicago. The lack of a layover has helped her compartmentalize the losses and focus on moving forward.

"I still won a national championship," she says. "I still count that completely. I don't discredit that at all. I'm not here sulking and pouting that we didn't win another championship. I know what I put in every year, and I know what my team did. We put ourselves in great positions. We came up short. I would have wanted to win a national championship when I played. But not everything works out perfectly."

Samuelson's new coach in Chicago, James Wade, is also the team's general manager. He was brought in this offseason to instill a winning culture in a wayward franchise, and he drafted Samuelson a few picks higher than many experts predicted in part because of her near-misses on the national stage.

"She has a chip on her shoulder," Wade says. "The team that she first played with won four national championships, and she went against players who were drafted 1-2-3. Right away she had that pressure, and she dealt with it. They weren't able to win it, but they were a dominating team. It never knocked her off her stride. She was a winner. She was a competitor. She was a smart player. We knew we had to have her."

Before she left the greenroom on draft night, Samuelson got a call from Gabby Williams, her former teammate at UConn and the Sky's selection at No. 4 in the 2018 draft. They had been suitemates in Storrs, and they talked about what they'd get to do as roommates in Chicago—build puzzles and watch The Office on Williams' new big-screen TV. They also talked about wanting to win titles that they missed out on together at UConn. Williams had no doubt that Samuelson would be part of their new team's turnaround.

"Lou is as tough as they come," Williams says. "She played with her ankle on a string. She played with a broken back. She'll carry those losses with her. I still carry my two. But it won't derail her career. She'll win championships here and overseas."

---

Samuelson started training camp with the Sky the first week of May, and Wade liked what he saw right away. For her first three seasons in Connecticut, Samuelson was primarily known as a shooter. Her career three-point percentage (41.5) justified that reputation. But when the Huskies needed rebounding her senior year, she rose to the occasion and snagged 6.3 a game. Wade envisioned her playing either role in the pick-and-roll and fitting in anywhere from 2 to 4 on the floor.

"She gives us an added dimension we didn't have," Wade says. "I felt like if we had taken a player from another position, it would have been a position we had. It probably would have stunted the growth of that young player. In order for all our players to grow, including her, she was the best fit."

But shortly after practice started, Wade was concerned. "I coached her for 15 minutes," he says. "The second time I saw her, she had this big eye. I was like, 'She did not come to camp this way.' I asked her: 'What the hell happened to your face?'"

Before she'd even started sweating as a professional basketball player, Samuelson had defended teammate Diamond DeShields as she went in for a layup. On the play, Samuelson took DeShields' wrist—and her Fitbit—to the face. As Samuelson finished practicing, her eye grew big and black. Afterward, with pride, she took a selfie to show off her first battle wound as a professional player. For Katie Lou Samuelson, playing through pain is part of the game.

"PHEEEESSAA!!!!!!"

She'd hear the word bellow out of coach Geno Auriemma at a practice, and she'd know she was about to get called out. Again. Another mistake.

And the worst part? She knew he was right.     

She was playing too deferential. Too timid.

Napheesa Collier had a long way to go.

But that didn't mean it didn't kill the now-senior UConn forward to hear it from the team's legendary coach.

Auriemma knew how to press her buttons. How to mine more out of her. He'd dog her about stretching out of her comfort zone around the hoop, developing a mid-range game.

At one practice, he called her selfish when she failed to dive for a loose ball that was rolling out of bounds.

And he'd yell these generalizations.

"Phee, you don't ever get a rebound!"

"Phee, you never stop the ball!"

Collier wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he got under her skin, though. She burned to prove him wrong.

Gabby Williams, who was a year ahead of Collier at UConn, remembers how rough it was. "I've watched Phee get pushed to the point where she just didn't think it was possible to go any harder," says Williams, who's now on the WNBA's Chicago Sky. "They were asking her to do things that she just didn't think she was capable of doing."

Like the 11-man drill, a continuous 3-on-2 full-court exercise that is one of the toughest in practice. Players are running faster than they can breathe. There is no stopping. Only passing and cutting and scoring.

Williams pulled Collier aside at one point, telling her: "It's gonna be hard. You're gonna be tired no matter what. It's how you approach it, mentally."

"It's not for everyone," Williams says now. "But everyone doesn't have 11 national championships."

And Collier wanted one of her own.

So she didn't break.

The freshman who had so far to go turned herself into one of the top scorers and rebounders in the program's history—and has it two wins away from a 12th national championship.

She also turned herself into a player who will hear her name announced near the top of the WNBA draft on April 10 and has earned praise from some of the sport's top stars.

"I love the fact that she can put the ball on the floor and that she can stretch the floor," two-time WNBA MVP Candace Parker tells B/R. "She plays bigger than she is. That's the type of game coming into the WNBA that will translate, because that's where the WNBA is now. It's positionless.

"Obviously, I'm in no way a Connecticut fan, but I'm a Phee fan because I know how much work she puts in."

To come this far, Collier had to.

"It was about believing in myself..." Collier says. "It was about trusting myself and knowing that I know how to play, I'm here for a reason, and I need to start proving that to myself."

---

As a young girl, Collier used to fall down often. On sidewalks, on basketball courts. She was so tall and stretchy, she'd trip on her toes all of a sudden and stumble to the ground, her long legs tangled underneath her.

"Oh, there's that line monster!" her mother, Sarah, would joke. "The line monster got you again!"

And lines weren't the only thing coming for Collier.

She was constantly the subject of hard fouls from opposing players. She'd leave games with fingernail marks trailing up and down her arms. She'd head-fake and bang her way to the basket, and someone would snatch the scrunchie off her ponytail.

That is, when teams finally let her play. Sarah and Napheesa's father, Gamal, couldn't find a team that would give third-grade Napheesa a chance in Jefferson City, Missouri. "We already have too many girls," coaches would say. "We just don't have any room."

Not one spot? Not even for a girl who already had a natural instinct for where the ball was and where it would be? Nope. But when a team finally did give her a jersey, she proved to be a force. She just flew. Grabbing rebounds, running the floor. "She was blocking shots, getting deflections, just everywhere," says Kay Foster, her former youth coach with the Missouri Lady Warriors. "You can't teach that."

Not that basketball was everything to her. Mom and Dad made sure of that. "We didn't want our kids to think that a sport defined them," Sarah says. So before games, you could find Napheesa curled up in a corner with a mystery novel from her favorite author, Ruth Ware.

But when the game started, she gave everything. "She never needed to talk about it," says Dan Rolfes, her high school coach at Incarnate Word Academy in St. Louis. "She just led by example."

Once, her coach on the Missouri Phenom club team, Reggie Middlebrook, told her that scouts were coming to see her for a two-day showcase in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but that she only needed to play one of the days. He didn't want her to get injured.

"Well, I want to play both days," Collier told him.

Middlebrook allowed it but under one condition: no diving for loose balls. Two minutes into the first game she played in the showcase, an errant pass flew, and Collier dove for it. She had to. "What did we just talk about?!" Middlebrook screamed. Gamal laughed and yelled out from the stands: "She doesn't know how to turn that switch off! You're gonna have to take her out of the game if you don't want her doing that!" Middlebrook subbed her out.

"I've had kids that worked hard," Middlebrook says. "But nobody like Pheesa.'"

Her parents taught her that. Boasting was forbidden. Probably the closest she has come to talking smack was heading into sixth grade, playing against a team of soon-to-be high schoolers. Collier dove for a loose ball with another girl. The girl yelled a few curse words at her, finishing with: "Get off me!"

Little Collier got back up, put her hand on her hip and looked over her shoulder at the girl, giving her a little hip shake: "Make me!"

It was one of the proudest moments of her young life.

Other than that, she stayed even-keeled. She's always been soft-spoken but direct. Calm. It's a demeanor that has often been misunderstood, labeled not assertive enough. Not fierce enough.

"Mom, my teammates don't get me," she'd say as a young girl. "They just don't get me. They don't know I'm funny!"

And she was kind. In high school, she once turned down a wide-open layup to kick the ball out to a teammate at the three-point line because the teammate was on the cusp of the 1,000-point mark. "If someone on the other team fell," says her brother, Kai, "she tried to pick them up."

Gamal started telling Napheesa when she was about 15 that every time she steps on the floor, she makes an impression. People will form opinions about her by the way she plays and the way she carries herself upon first meeting her.

"So, what do you want your story to be?" he said. 

"My story?"

"You write your story, your legacy. So, how do you want it to be?"

Collier wasn't sure. Not yet.

---

Collier was deferring. Overpassing, overthinking. She was a freshman at UConn, exhausted from conditioning, from weights, having never lifted before. She was barely able to hobble up the steep steps around campus after practice.

Every day, she was just trying to survive.

Then there was Breanna Stewart, a senior who never seemed to tire. She was so dominant, so poised, she already looked like a WNBA MVP. So during the first few weeks of practice, Collier fed Stewart the ball on most occasions, instinctively looking to dish before even squaring up and taking a peek at the rim to see if there was an opportunity for herself.

Sometimes she'd forget the plays, concerned with where she needed to be instead of just being. The Huskies offense isn't designed for specific plans. It's an outline that breeds creativity and requires intelligence. Make the right reads and you'll succeed. But Collier came in more structural than spontaneous. In high school, most plays on her team were diagrammed.

"The talent was there," says Marisa Moseley, a former Huskies assistant coach who is now the head coach at Boston University. "There was never a time when she wasn't trying to beat her opponent down the floor and get a bucket."

"She's got that killer instinct in her," says former teammate Azura Stevens, who's now with the WNBA's Dallas Wings.

But Collier's confidence dropped. Sometimes she didn't feel like she belonged. She wanted to be coached, though. Always has. As a second-grader, she came home from soccer practice one day, frustrated: "Mom, Coach kept telling everybody, 'Good job, good job,'" she said. "But nobody was doing a good job!"

Just like Collier knew she was not doing a good job early on at UConn.

And she knew she'd hear about it. She didn't think of transferring. Not when her parents had one rule in their household: that Napheesa and her siblings, Kai and Wanza, weren't allowed to say It's not fair or It's not my fault.

Collier, like any first-year player, was trying to fit in. To earn her place. To be respectful. "She just thought, I'm here to be a teammate—not understanding that, you know, you gotta cut everybody's throat," Gamal says.

Auriemma made sure she learned the lesson, challenging her to play better defense, be more physical, get in better shape.

It was, in Gamal's view, "brutal."

---

After that freshman year, Collier was sure of one thing: "I never wanted to feel like this again."

No more second-guessing. Collier was going to fight for a starting spot. "She played with a ton of heart," says Kia Nurse, her former roommate, who's now with the WNBA’s New York Liberty.

Collier trained twice a day that summer with Alex Bazzell, who also trains Parker and Atlanta Hawks rookie star Trae Young. The first sessions began at 6 a.m. Stepping outside of the paint, she developed a soft touch. Over and over, she labored on her footwork.

Collier would compete against three men's college players in a grueling drill where one would throw the ball off the glass and she would battle the other two for the rebound. Then the two players would smother her and she'd have to beat them to half court. Then it was the third player's turn to guard her one-on-one down on the other end of the floor. She'd have to score 10 times total. Up and down the floor, she'd have to push through exhaustion while finding ways to change her pace and handle the ball under pressure.

She hated it, but she didn't stop. 

"Her level of consistency is something I haven't seen," Bazzell says. "She's never had a bad workout. She never just goes through the motions. I've never seen that from anyone."

Collier came into her sophomore season much improved, but again, the coaching staff challenged her. The Huskies were doing a rebounding drill when Collier failed to box out a male practice player. "That's why you aren't going to play this year. That's why you'll never play," Collier remembers Auriemma saying to her.

OK, OK. I'm going to show you, she thought. The male practice player didn't get another board over her for the rest of practice. Or for the next few practices.

Then, one day, Collier went into Auriemma's office. He told her she was a good player. Coach thinks I'm good? Me?

"But," Auriemma said, "if you do these things, you could be a great player."

He told her she needed to continue to expand her game to mid-range and three-point range and improve her ball-handling.

After that, she began to trust her instincts. And she shined, leading the team in scoring (20.4 points per game) and rebounding (9.1 per game) as a sophomore while shooting a blistering 67.8 percent. She was named a first-team All-American, but for the first time in five seasons, UConn didn't win a national championship. The Huskies lost to Mississippi State in the Final Four.

Collier continued to be asked about her demeanor all the while. Why are you so quiet? Why are you so calm? People didn't see her for what she is: goofy and outgoing, always playing pranks, like hiding behind basketballs and then screaming to scare her UConn teammates. Some spectators said she didn't have emotions, didn't have personality.

They still say those things. Every comment hurts. It's that familiar, painful feeling she felt as a young girl of not being understood.

"That makes me so mad," Collier says. She'd feel pulled to defend herself, to explain that it makes no sense for her to show her opponent she's frustrated by losing her composure, or to celebrate when she makes a key basket, either.

"You don't run around and boast when you pay a bill or make a deadline," Gamal would tell her as a girl. "That's just what you're supposed to do."

It didn't help that her stats dipped a bit last season as a junior (16.1 points and 7.4 rebounds per game, 58.3 percent shooting), though she remained a vocal leader of the team. She was playing a new position on the perimeter, something she had never done before, and felt unsure of herself.

And the way the season ended definitely didn't help.

---

The thoughts still sometimes flood her mind when she thinks of The Shot—the game-winning jumper Arike Ogunbowale hit over her last March to lift Notre Dame past UConn in the Final Four.

If only I had counted down the shot clock. If only I had gotten closer. Just a little bit closer. If only I wasn't so wary of a drive. Of an easy layup. Of failing to close out.  If only... If only... If only...

In that moment, Collier felt what anyone who has ever loved basketball has felt: the need to have a do-over, to turn back time. But she couldn't.

She could only try to move past it.

And skate. With her entire team.

A week after the loss, the Huskies went to Ron-A-Roll, a roller-skating rink about 20 minutes from campus. She had a choice: She could continue to wallow, to blame herself, to mourn her team falling short for the second straight season, or she could whirl past all of it. At least for a few hours.

Collier laced up the white laces of her tan skates and began to pump her arms, her legs. Faster. Around and around, she zipped across the rink, settling into a groove. A smile broke through. More laps. Then laughs. Everyone kept falling down. Twice. Three times. Five times. Collier was one of the more graceful players, but she too wiped out.

Each time, players picked each other up, laughing harder. They didn't have to think about what critics were saying: UConn's lost it. They're just not the same. Is this an end of an era?

No. Collier wouldn't allow that to happen. Not after all she's been through.

She showed up her senior season back to All-American form, averaging 21.2 points and 10.8 rebounds. You can see why the WNBA is so excited about her. She has become the most consistent player in women's college basketball. She blocks shots and defends players much taller than her 6'2" frame. Her fadeaway is automatic. And she can face up or step out, too.

"She does a little bit of everything and does it every day, every game, every time we're on the floor," says Chris Dailey, UConn's associate head coach.

Still, as if Collier needed the extra motivation, she was not named a finalist for the Naismith Trophy as a senior—and UConn received a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament despite a 31-2 regular season that included a win over Notre Dame, which did receive a No. 1.

"That lit a fire within us. We were so confused and shocked by the No. 2 seed, not really understanding where it came from," Collier says. "I think we do still definitely feel disrespected. So, I mean, watch out, I guess."

She's using the tournament to right all wrongs, averaging 21.8 points and 13.3 rebounds per game and helping the Huskies earn a remarkable 12th straight trip to the Final Four after an 80-73 win over top-seeded Louisville on Sunday.

In the waning seconds of the Louisville win, she broke from her normally reserved on-court demeanor, flashing a smile as she jogged back to UConn's huddle. She couldn't help it. The basketball gods had just given her a friendly roll on two crucial free throws.

Dailey wasn't having it, though, shouting, "The game's not over!"

Collier quickly wiped the smile off her face, but her mother, Sarah, knew the jubilance wasn't all the way gone. "She was still smiling on the inside," Sarah says.

This Collier, the one who knows who she is and what she can do, isn't the one who showed up in Storrs four years ago. 

So when she is asked yet again why she is the way she is, by reporters leading up to the Final Four, she takes a deep breath. "I can't control what people think about me or how they see me," Collier says.

Then she remembers why she's here.

"No matter what people say, I definitely wouldn't change how I play," Collier says. "I didn't come here to get individual awards. I came here to win championships."

That's what she wants her story to be.

            

Mirin Fader is a writer-at-large for B/R Mag. She's written for the Orange County Register, espnW.com, SI.com and Slam. Her work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, the Football Writers Association of America and the Los Angeles Press Club. Follow her on Twitter: @MirinFader.